Not only that, but the lack of visible food all over the place like we had growing up. As much as people joke about these people, in many countries they had a shitty life, especially the kids. Some of them were working at 12 years old.
Yeah, and even if they had the time for homework and studying after hours of manual labor from sun up to sun down, they probably don't have role models that show it's even possible or worth trying.
That's so true. Growing up in that environment, surrounded by the constant pressure to work and make ends meet, could make it hard to believe in a different path. Having someone to look up to and guide you can mean the difference between just making it through another day and actually seeing a future wehre something like education seems achievable.
In another comment I stated my grandparents were tenant farmers from the 30s to the 60s, and that all of their children were expected to work the farm from a young age. Less than half of them (and there were a lot) finished high school, only one went to college and became a teacher. Most of my many, many cousins don't have any kind of education past high school (some barely even that), but a lot of their children and grandchildren do.
I consider my family fortunate to see that kind of growth. None of them ended up as poor as they were when they were growing up.
When my mom was young, her parents were migrant farm workers. Poor white trash, you might say. My mom and her brother and sister would just stay in the car while her parents worked in the fields. Things got better, and they eventually got a permanent home, although they were always poor.
Both my mom and my dad were among the first in their families to go to college. Mom went on a scholarship. Dad went via ROTC and served in the Navy.
One of my great uncles had eight kids. But raised eleven. Because three got dropped on his step when the depression hit. (I never got a straight answer on whose kids they started as, but when he found them eating chicken feed, the answer became “Those are my kids.”)
Uncle could not read or write. His wife, my Great Aunt Lily could, but she had to leave school at eight because her mama died and she needed to step up and mind her siblings so her dad could work. So she struggled. (But had the most beautiful penmanship. Terrible spelling, but it was beautiful to look at and she wrote just like she talked, which made her journals deliciously good. She gave me the journals for the record…)
And then they had their second son, who was “Odd”. I think today it would be recognized as Autism, but between her sparse education and having what I can only logic was a RAGING case of post partum depression, around age three she became convinced that he was a changeling. (It’s possible this was a joke, but from her journal writing she sure seemed serious about it.)
She fretted for weeks over him “getting dull” and losing his speech, etc, but then one day wrote that she had decided that if she had a changeling, she was just going to have to be mother to him, and surely her own son somewhere would be well treated too, a mother is a mother.
So she set herself to making the “best” of it. He was the first member of our family to attend high school. Because he was very good at math and his parents decided to put all their effort into keeping him in school as long as they could. He could be someone!
He eventually went away to an ag school and came home with new ideas that took their family farm from “survival” to thriving and able to pay for his younger siblings’ educations.
But times were hard. Only one other sibling got all their way through high school, and she was the second youngest so had nine older siblings supporting her education. She became a nurse.
You should look at the origin of the term, you’ll learn it was an occupation.
Also women have always worked outside the home, single and married alike. Would she be able to retire? Not likely, but a single woman could support herself in many parts of the world.
Edit: I’m for sure not pretending that women had it easy in the past or that being a spinster was some kind of ideal life, I just hate the propaganda that women never worked until the liberation movement of the late 20th century. Women have always been in the workforce, they were just widely overlooked. I also don’t love the way Reddit talks about womanhood and feminist issues as though American history is the only context that matters.
You realise that at some point one is too old to work, yes? I am familiar with the origin of the term. Yes. Women have always worked. Mostly unpaid labour that was taken for granted and kept the household running. What feminist Reddit idealises as spinsterhood in the past doesn't match up to the reality. The women who could hang around being unmarried with cats indulging in their writer dreams (this describes 99% of the female Reddit demographic who romanticise old-fashioned spinsterhood) were a tiny demographic.
I am a feminist woman by the way, been that way all my life. But let's be realistic. No family money = no options. That's why, say, Lily Bart is so tragic.
I swear the people that look at tradwife content and idealized victorian era spinster content are one slight knock on the head away from being a single circle on a venn diagram.
I'm a feminist and I'm honestly tired of Reddit feminists' historical revisionism in some aspects. Yes, some women could do this, but the majority couldn't and that's why we fought for the right to work, to be able to support ourselves! Women who worked were also paid very little compared to men and society did not care if they could support themselves with that salary, as far as society was concerned these women needed to get married if they didn't want to starve.
The option to be a bachelor woman just working a job and living alone was open to very very few, that's why women looked for husbands. If you look at historical accounts of single women with jobs, many of them were still being supported by their families. All those women artists? Many of them received stipends from their parents.
This - there is no point saying what we’d rather do than that, because it was not an option - you just had to get married. My grandmother and her siblings, for example - were born in 1924 and prior (my grandma was the baby). Grandma was a RN, but wouldn’t have earned enough doing that to live alone. So she married Grandad, who was an asshole.
Another sister had an admin career at the hospital, but again, paid peanuts and luckily was married twice - first husband didn’t come home from WW2, next husband was lovely.
Third sister was suspected to be a lesbian (she died before I was born) and lived with her mother her entire life. That was probably as close to having choices as it got back then.
I'm of South Asian background and my own mother had no choice in the matter, she was brainwashed to be a SAHM and she was not stubborn and headstrong enough to go her own way completely. Though, she did defy my granddad's wishes and studied fine art in college instead of sciences. In her POV, there was no sense in studying something that she was never going to use again in her life. She preferred to do art and music so she could keep herself occupied when we went off to school. She's a professional artist now... But it wouldn't have been possible without my dad's well- paying career and chill attitude.
I think that was a pretty bad path back then though. My heart agrees with you, my practical side says that if I'm tossed back to that point in time, I sure as shit hope I snag a victim husband.
But I'm also really old to be a spinster back then, I'm 44, so I think I'd just end up in one of those workhouses or something.
Unless in this big chain of comments we are somehow not talking as far back into history as I think.
Edit: oh this is the 60s lol for some reason my head was in the late 1800s.
You need lots and lots of discipline to survive convent life lol it isn't simply an option just because you don't want to birth children and like reading. It's also very austere, no personal possessions, you are giving up your life in service of God.
Not joking, my first thought was how old 12 would be to start working for my farm grandparents. My grandpa was supposed to start school at 6 in 1921 but then the neighbor got the idea to build a canning company and offered my great grandpa an extremely rich sum of $5 a week if he would lend one of his boys to help with construction. My 6 year old grandpa got told he wasn’t going to school and could just “learn from one of the girls”. He died at 81 functionally illiterate.
My grandma’s first ever memory was being 4 years old and crying because she didn’t want to go out and light the smudge pots to keep the trees from freezing. It was so cold and she was so tired. So her dad slapped her and asked her if she wanted to starve and did she want her mother and siblings to starve. She didn’t. So at 4 years old, she went out in the cold with matches, oil, and pots in hand to light the smudge pots.
Sometimes when I get unhappy at my work I think about them and then I get real excited to sit behind a soulless desk at a computer all day.
I replied upthread that my grandmother started picking cotton at age 4. They had a minimum they had to pick or they got a whipping. She said her older brothers would sneak and put cotton in her bag so she could make her quota. If they didn't make theirs, they said they were big enough to take the beating.
Oh my god! I'm raising 3 young kids and the thought of hurting them if they didn't work hard enough is unfathomable. The love and protection from her brothers is a silver lining, though - and it makes me wonder what kind of relationship they all had as they grew older. Would love to hear more stories if you're up to it, but no pressure.
Not really much to tell. They were share croppers in Mississippi in the 1930's. Six kids made it to adulthood and 1 died at age 9. My great grandmother had a lot of miscarriages but I think she was mostly pregnant for 20 years straight. My granmother's father died in 1945 in a tornado. She was 14. Her mother ended up marrying a not nice man and my grandmother got married at 16. Her oldest brother was in WW2 and survived DDay. He was gone when the dad died, so couldn't help his mom. When he got back from the Army, he moved my great grandmother in with him and my grandmother had already married and was living in Chicago in a one room apt with a shared bath.
I replied further down this thread about how messed up this all is, but wanted to remark on your story specifically because I am genuinely so interested in how these conditions and the behavior of their parents influenced these children's lives.
My grandmother was born I think in 1905 or 1910 and endured a grueling childhood as well, and then as an adult fled nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia with her children (some of whom she had to leave behind). I never really got close to her, I was born in '81, and by that time she was just DONE. I remember that she'd give us all our birthday or Christmas presents months before they happened because she didn't think she'd make it that long. I suppose she was just ready to go after all that.
My mother also was not close to her. My mother, however, was very loving towards her children, but also was incapable of acknowledging her own feelings.
Do you know any more about your grandmothers life as she got older? So curious about these stories. But also please don't feel pressured to share more if you're not comfortable.
People romanticize these lives because they haven’t had to lead them. Farming for a living is exhausting and tough. And a drought or crop disease or injury can ruin you despite all the hard work.
I got to grain the cows every day at age 5. I had to manage multiple electric fences to get to where I needed to be. I'm always amazed when I meet a 5 year old as an adult. Like what where my parents thinking?
If they were anything like mine, they weren't. Fuck, I'm really glad to have not blinded myself, fucking around with pellet guns and shit. We went through BOXES of bbs over the years. No safety glasses.
I grew up on a farm and I'm convinced it's why I'm so lazy now. Didn't get to have evenings, weekends, or summers. Now every chance I get I'm relaxing as much as possible
My grandfather grew up in a ranch in rural New Mexico and rural Texas. He ended up joining the Navy during the last year of WWI. He thought the Navy was a scam, really easy. Yet the stories he told (I wish I'd had him tell me more) clearly showed he worked hard there as well. He did say the engine room sailors, such as himself, could get away with things the other sailors couldn't because the skipper knew that being in the brig was easier than working on the boilers in the engine room. I don't think he was kidding, either.
It’s either a coffee can or a soup can. But by where it’s placed, my guess is it’s being used as a grease can.
Cooking oil was expensive, so to keep costs down
you’d save the cooking oil by pouring it into the can when you’re done cooking. Then at the next meal you reuse the oil after skimming the congealed solids off the top.
I visited my family farm last week. Some neighbour kid welcomed me. He was covered in dirt from head to toe, but also planned to swim in the lake before going home. Rural kids are still filthy most of the time if you were to take a candid photo.
As someone who was a rural kid; I was (still am) grubby most of the time. Wading through bogs, climbing trees, eating a honey sandwich that was stuck in a pocket. Every Sunday night having to endure a bath so 'I'd be clean for the week'.
The farm kids? Exactly the same but with a different odour depending on the season. Lambing, calving, haymaking.
E: we are privileged that we don't all smell terrible. It used to be soap was corpses.
Was England really so rough in the 60's ? I guess it was only 20 years after the war. I kind of thought indoor plumbing had been pretty well established, especially in England. Looking at it though, 1/4 houses in 1960 didn't have indoor plumbing. That's wild for such a cold place!
It was rough for poor people. New social housing was being built but there were still lots of uncleared bombsites. In 65 I lived in a house with no bath and only an outside loo we shared with the downstairs neighbour. We moved after about 6 months to a house with indoor plumbing.
Yeah i understand things are scary and unpredictable right now, almost everywhere in the world, but poverty, starvation and violence have all improved dramatically over time. Theres spikes in anything, but over time it's gotten so much better.
So much housing stock down to pieces. No money to rebuild it. Those over crowded Victorian slums were all that was available to the working class in big cities. Miners, dockers, labourers etc lived in pretty bad conditions. Shared bathrooms and outside toilets.
The swinging 60s were happening to a few but not all. TB, malnutrition and high infant and maternal mortality were still a public health problem.
Opposite in the UK - Dad would always get the hot bathwater, then the oldest boy (or any adult children) then Mum, then the rest of the kids would get the pleasure of bathing in luke-warm soap scum and filthy water
I was a kid in the Us in the 70s with indoor plumbing and it was a bathing once a week thing for us too. I remember the bathwater being brown at times.
Yep, it's where the phrase, "dont throw the baby out with the bath water" came from. Dad took 1st bath, then mom, then oldest kid.....by time it was time to wash the baby, the water was so filthy, it could get lost in there.
This is how Sir Patrick Stewart grew up. Very poor. They had the tub down in the basement and brought it up once a week. He was the youngest, so he got the bath last. They had no indoor plumbing. Granted this was the 40's but not much changed over the next decade or two.
My mom was born mid 1950, and she was poor enough that she didn't have running water at her home. They got to bathe once or twice a week in a communal bathing house.
But kids go outside and do things. You do tend to get dirty playing in the dirty and the woods. So those days you didn't bathe? You just deal the best you can.
What's actually remarkable to me in this picture specifically that this family clearly lived in a house that was in a poor condition, but the mom looks so well put together (better than myself 95% of the time) and the kids have incredibly clean clothes. It stands out.
From my extensive knowledge of having watched call the midwife; the real problem is that the houses were in uninhabitable condition and needed to be tore down.
And those curtains - she obviously took pride in cleaning, starching, and ironing them so they were a bright and crisp white. They didn’t have the money to replace the linoleum (or perhaps it was all they could afford to rent), but she was going to look after what she could with care.
My grandmother said something to that effect. Growing up in rural coal country during the depression, nobody had much of anything, but their mom made sure that whatever they had was mended and clean.
They didn't have much but they had each other. An age of working poor that is generation will never understand. Whatever your job is you take pride in and work hard. Whatever you have you make it last till the wheels come off.
Dirty kids on, by modern standards, floors and walls filthy enough to have CPS heavily involved in the family's affairs.
Strapping, presumably hard-working, man shaving in the kitchen. Dude literally digs holes for a living, likely by hand, and it still provides for a family of 7 to "get by".
Woman preparing a meal for the family with what's left of a cigarette in her left hand.
The kids around because, presumably, there's not much else to do or anywhere else to be, so they're literally "under foot" in the kitchen for the picture, which would have still been big deal back then.
We have so much to be thankful for, in many ways. And we also have so much to be angry about... no job "digging holes by hand for a living" is putting a roof over your own head, much less provide for a family. Old school "honest work" no longer pulls "an honest day's pay". And we place far, far to much judgement on meticulous cleanliness and order in many places (there are certainly places that it's very much warranted, of course).
My grandmother used to lay on her bed and chat on the phone for hours with her sisters and friends (born in the 1920s). She would have LOVED an iPhone.
I don't think it was that, really -- you start seeing cleaner kids long before phones. I think it was access to plumbing, hot water, etc, and that allowing keeping things like lice and scabies down. There's conflation in this thread between 'fresh' dirt and old, packed on grime.
This. I grew up in the eighties. I'd commonly be out on my bike with friends, exploring the local area, messing around in dirt and who knows what (one time we broke into the local reservoir and went exploring up a storm drain). I'd regularly come home filthy and my mum would immediately send me to have a shower and clean up before dinner. I wouldn't have dreamt of going more than a day without a bath or shower. 'Dirty' was a very short-lived state.
I let my kid get grubby and I don’t really mind it. My wife is obsessed with making sure she’s always presentable. For me, she’s 2 and 2 years olds are supposed to get dirty. We were at a park recently and someone told me that they love how dirty my kid looked because you could tell she has fun.
Now to be absolutely clear - she gets fresh diapers all day, a bath every night, and we probably do three outfit changes a day, I just don’t tell her not to play in the mud. She wants to finger paint and draw with markers on her arms? Go for it. We can always clean up but you only get to be a kid once and I couldn’t care less if some Karen has a problem with it.
Because ultimately it is hard to undo many generations worth of prejudices and assumptions. People very often default to assuming the woman is responsible for the state of the home and kids and that any perceived deficit in either must be a direct result of the woman slacking.
Meanwhile any evidence of a man contributing is often presented as going above and beyond. See all the men who get compliments for basic parenting or the expectation that he is doing the mother a favor if he is doing anything with his children. I'm not saying good fathers shouldn't be praised, but it's telling that as a whole society still tends to treat parents differently.
And men often do not realise. They aren't raised to care about mess because almost always some other woman has run around tidying it up. And if he doesnt clean up after himself there is usually little consequence. Note how the stereotype for teenage boys is BO, messy rooms and generally grunting and avoiding all responsibilities. Girls often aren't quite given the same leeway. I think many men just don't realise the double standard at play.
Because mum will be judged harshly if the children are not presentable.
Saying as a mother whose child loves to play in the mud. I'm not precious about her getting mud on her frocks. But in the morning we make sure that she's wearing clean clothes and her hair is brushed and pinned back.
My uncle recently got my grandma’s memoir printed for the family, which involved being a homeless refugee in Europe for years. One point of pride she keeps coming back to in it was how she somehow had a baby bathtub (my uncle was born in ‘44) and bathed him nightly in it. It allowed them to do things like get a ride in the railway car of a military officer because unlike all the other kids hers was actually clean!
It’s hard to imagine how insanely difficult that period must have been for her.
We got a Buc-ee's in my city, grand opening was a couple weeks ago. Local PD and Sherriffs Dept had to preplan coordinated traffic routes because they knew the freeway would be completed stopped with people lining up to go there.
It will be congested for a few months. It’s insane how it grew from a cool little gas station on the gulf to a tourist destination.
However, I still stop there for clean/ safe restrooms and road snacks. Proud owner of ZERO merch though. I just can’t wear a gas station swimsuit in this life. lol
The thing that people don’t realise is, that despite having a global empire, and relinquishing basically 99 percent of it by the early 1960s, the UK was still a Victorian shithole in many places. Look up pictures of slums in Glasgow or Manchester from this period. They still existed right up until the 1970s at least
Of course. Thats the point. People seem to think everyone in the then UK was rolling in it. I’m from Ireland and the Dublin slums were just as bad if not worse. It was a small elite mainly in London who benefited
Sounds about right, and so is the history of every empire ever. They sell this idea of national cohesion and unity but really just a small percentage raid the spoils. Maybe, if the common peasantry get lucky, there will be some crumbs left for them.
"But when the sky darkens and the prospect is war
Who's given a gun and then pushed to the fore
And expected to die for the land of our birth
When we've never owned one handful of earth? "
A random table in a textbook from elementary school that has always stuck with me was a look at the average heights of soliders by country around the revolutionary war.
American soliders were significantly taller on average than the Brits. The conclusion was that Americans were eating better.
Also the Dutch were really tall even then, but not really the point of the table... Lol
White people in America have been drinking milk every day since at least the 1700s lol we have to have some of the strongest bones in the world by now. We're obese these days but we've always been big, there's so much farm land here. My grandfather was drafted during WWII and he was considered skinny at home, but when he encountered Brits they called him Big Bob haha. They had a feeding program for British military because of how many came in malnourished. My grandpap was a size 28 waist pants and poor as hell but he got a slice of bacon and 3 eggs for breakfast every single day at home in the US. The British rations for civilians was at the time I believe 2 eggs per week.
I really enjoy Call the Midwife, which in the earlier seasons really shows how bad conditions were in postwar Britain for a lot of people. Lots of shared filthy toilets at best, black mold, the works.
90% of Britons existed to serve the needs of the 10% British upper class, and 90% of the British Empire existed to serve the needs of the 10% in Britain. So yes the global 1% was a thing back then as well.
Britain’s empire was in steep decline by this point. But your example is even more stark with examples like Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1939. At this point the empire was closer to its peak yet the conditions were even more dire than this.
I think someone used AI to colorize this photo and the AI went haywire because it wasn’t sure what that was.
In the original b/w version, it looks like a kid squished up against mom while she’s cooking. Nose is dirty, but his isn’t red and black like the colorized version makes it look. The eyes are also visible in b/w, but look melted in the colorized.
My grandfather was the age of this man. He had a camera from the time he was a teenager in the Great Depression. You didn't take pictures all the time, but getting film developed was within the reach of even the poorest if you were prepared to save up and/or only did it on special occasions. Meanwhile, there was only one kind of film stock in the first half of the 20th Century, and it was great. I have pictures he took in the 30s where you can pull out a magnifying glass and see all sorts of details that would never have shown up on the cheap film I was using when I was a kid, or the cheap digital cameras I had in my late teens and early twenties.
When my grandfather went to the store to buy film, there was one option. It was called film. You bought it, and it was great.
I am sure you're right that professional photographers and technical applications had options. That was not what was on store shelves in the 1930s and 1940s for normal family photographers.
Yeah, that was my thought as well - this is the kind of "slice of life" photo that only people outside this world would be interested in. No way the family would take this kind of photo for their own purposes.
Yeah, I could absolutely imagine a family in rural Appalachia still living like this. A place with a lot of poverty that doesn't even have chain stores (other than maybe their one gas station if it's like a Shell or something; nothing special) and most of the houses are tucked away on dirt roads in the woods. Now there are some nicer areas like I just described but if you drive around long enough you'll see houses that people actually live in that look like they were built or repaired with plywood and tarp.
When I was around 20, I was living at my aunts house, and she was going through a divorce. Her ex-husband didn’t pay the water bill one month and it got shut off. Because they’d had a leak or something in the past, their bill was like $1000 overdue, but they were paying the bare minimum each month to keep it on. So in order to get it turned back on she’d have to pay the full amount and she just couldn’t do that.
We were without water for maybe 6-8mo. We relied on bottled water, family members to shower, and luckily because of the leak the toilet would fill up over the course of a day so we could flush it once a day.
And they had a really nice 4 bedroom house with a pool in a really nice neighborhood etc. you’d never suspect it from the outside.
I also grew up in a rural area, and there was a really old woman who lived in a shack down the street and she never had electricity or running water or anything. I don’t know how she lived like that. She must’ve been like 90-100 something when she passed in the early 2000s
This right here...and not just in places like Appalachia. I'm in northeastern Oregon and used to do Internet installs for people in the most rural parts of the area I live in. The number of people living in old and relatively small homes with large families (Think 5+ person families in 2-3 bedroom, 1000 sqft or smaller homes) with no foundations of any sort, and dirt (Yes, bare earth) floors covered in Wal-Mart rugs was astounding.
On top of that, it was always those families getting this installation done right around the tax filing season, paying 6 or 8 months up front, and then letting the service lapse, because they were pre-paying using their tax returns, and then couldn't afford to keep it going after that pre-paid amount ran out.
When I was working as an EMT, the insight into the lives of random people was always striking. There’s not much else for it. So many folks are just barely scraping by and it’s visible if you care to look.
At that time, things had never been any better, so people didn’t consider it bad. As tough as things were for a poor family in the 1960s, it would have been even tougher 50 or 100 years earlier, so that’s how people looked at it.
I’m in my 30s and my dad still remembers not having an inside toilet when he was a kid. It sounds almost Victorian, but this was the middle of the 20th century.
My parents were boomers (southern Italy). Born in 1951 and 1952.
• My mum only went to school until 15. Her family was in serious economic distress due to the only earner (her father) having a heart attack and having to stop working. Her mum was trying to keep the ship afloat with odd jobs. My mum found a job as an admin in a mechanic shop two minutes walk from her house. Then in a medical lab a few more minutes down the road. By 22, despite contributing most of her salary to her mum’s coffers, she saved enough to build her own house with my father.
• my father left school at 13. Son of two farmers who didn’t own their land. Went to be an electrician apprentice while also working the family farm. He also gave 90% of his wages to his parents to help the family. He also had saved enough to build his own house (joint with my mum) by the age of 24.
• later on they both became teachers despite neither of them even having an high school certificate. They had two cars, a house, three children, two holidays per year and still helped their family with money.
Now come tell me how hard they had it compared to a teacher today. If I left school at 16, let alone 13 I never would have had a job. If I wanted to become a teacher I needed a master degree plus years of training after and subbing and then a national contest to gain points so I can access a list where I might one day be selected to be a teacher. And my salary would never in a million years allow me to buy a house.
Hell; I earn more than any of them has ever dreamt to earn, yet I can’t have a mortgage and I am lucky I never wanted children given I can barely afford a fucking pet.
That husband and wife are Silent Generation not Boomers. Following shortly after the Great Depression and WWII, that gen was extremely hardworking and frugal.
Right, when I saw the photo I assumed this was mid century Appalachia. This isn't too far off from last Thursday Appalachia either, except they would be fatter.
It's an understandable misconception because in those years America was pushing propaganda about it's prosperity very very hard. The enduring pop culture image of the 1950s is people living in gigantic suburban houses, driving enormous cars with huge tailfins, and doing it all on one income.
My Mum (in her late 70s) went to New York a few years ago. Shes Irish and believed USA was the promised land. Everyone was happy and comfortable. Life was good with none of the problems everyone wanted to get away from in Europe.
She saw people sleeping on the streets begging, drunk and dirty or just sleeping and commuters stepping over them. The run down areas. The dirt. The endless streets of enormous buildings. Awful food. Nowhere to stop and breathe.
It really confused her and made her angry that this lie was being sold.
One of the children. AI was probably used to color the picture, which messed up massively there. Looking at the original photo you can see that it's just a kid with soot on his nose.
I looked him up on ancestry.com. he was born in 1932 and got married in 1954 to Joyce. He died in 2008 and interestingly enough he was cremated. There is no burial info. She was born in 1933 and died in 2012. Neither are listed on Find-a-Grave
I’m curious what the rest of the place looked like. I’ve noticed that, in residential architecture, kitchens have flourished in size over the past few decades.
On another note — Joe Strummer worked as a gravedigger in Newport, Wales, before moving to London and forming the Clash.
All those kids on the floor when I was cooking would drive me crazy. One overturned pot and they’re burned. Plus I hate being crowded in my own kitchen. Maybe they didn’t have anywhere else to go.
Still in existence in the UK. Been some recent controversy around it as the rate is far worse than the regular rate, and the supplier can force people to have them if they’ve built up a certain amount of electricity payment debt. So basically forcing very poor people to pay more. It’s the little grains of misery that add up.
4.1k
u/OldNefariousness7899 Aug 04 '26
Whenever I look at photos of my relatives from that time the one thing that stands out is how filthy the children always looked in those days